A plasma display panel (hereinafter referred to as “panel”) typical as an image display device that has many pixels arranged in a plane shape has many discharge cells that have a scan electrode, a sustain electrode, and a data electrode. The panel excites a phosphor to emit light with gas discharge that is generated inside each discharge cell, and performs color display.
A plasma display device using such a panel mainly employs a subfield method as a method of displaying an image. In this method, one field period is formed of a plurality of subfields having a predetermined luminance weight, and an image is displayed by controlling light emission or no light emission in each discharge cell in each subfield.
The plasma display device has a scan electrode driving circuit for driving a scan electrode, a sustain electrode driving circuit for driving a sustain electrode, and a data electrode driving circuit for driving a data electrode. The driving circuit of each electrode of the plasma display device applies a required driving voltage waveform to each electrode. The data electrode driving circuit, based on an image signal, independently applies an address pulse for address operation to each of many data electrodes.
When the panel is seen from the side of the data electrode driving circuit, each data electrode serves as a capacitive load having a stray capacitance between it and an adjacent data electrode, scan electrode, and sustain electrode. Therefore, in order to apply a driving voltage waveform to each data electrode, charge and discharge of this capacitance must be required. As a result, the data electrode driving circuit requires power consumption for the charge and discharge.
The power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit increases as charge/discharge current of the capacitance possessed by the data electrode increases. This charge/discharge current largely depends on an image signal to be displayed. For instance, when an address pulse is applied to no data electrode, the charge/discharge current becomes “0” and hence the power consumption becomes minimum. Also when an address pulse is applied to all data electrodes, the charge/discharge current becomes “0” and hence the power consumption is small. When an address pulse is applied to data electrodes in a random fashion, the charge/discharge current becomes large and hence the power consumption also becomes large.
As a method of reducing the power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit, the following method or the like is disclosed. In this method, the power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit is calculated based on an image signal, for example. When the power consumption is large, an address operation is prohibited firstly in the subfield of the smallest luminance weight to restrict the power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit (for example, patent literature 1). Alternatively, a method or the like of decreasing the power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit by replacing an original image signal with an image signal for decreasing the power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit is disclosed (for example, patent literature 2).
The methods of patent literatures 1 and 2 are mainly used for preventing the plasma display device from failing when the power consumption excessively increases. Therefore, the methods of patent literatures 1 and 2 can largely damage the image display quality.
Recently, the power consumption of the data electrode driving circuit has steadily increased in response to enlargement in screen and enhancement in definition. Therefore, a power reducing method capable of being steadily used without sacrificing the image display quality has been demanded.